At the same time, Ars has discovered, it appears Germans were heading to the European Commission website. According to Commission figures, there was a 213 percent increase in traffic the German landing page showing the link to the joint declaration on the UK referendum.

The equivalent English language page saw an increase of 68 percent over Thursday with more than 15,000 visits while 23,577 visits to the Commission’s generic multilingual page saw its traffic up nearly 40 percent over an average day.

In all 28,635 people visited the official joint statement given by the current chiefs of the EU institutions: Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker, leader of the Council Donald Tusk, European Parliament president Martin Schulz, and Dutch premier Mark Rutte (the Netherlands currently holds the rotating presidency of the Council).

Further Reading

However, those looking for answers would have done well to check out the memo page with its handy FAQs on the UK referendum, the first of which is “Now that the UK has voted to leave the European Union, what happens next?” That page saw more than 18,000 visits on Friday—a fairly small fraction of the 500 million citizens of the European Union who could be affected if the UK government decides to invoke Article 50 and begin its official exit from the EU.

On the European Parliament website, “Friday was comparable to a good day during a plenary session, but nothing sensational,” Parliament’s head of press Marjory Van Den Broeke told Ars. She added it was high for a Friday, typically the quietest day of the week, adding “most attention went to the joint statement of Schulz, Juncker, Tusk, and Rutte.”